The Editors of hamburg review of social sciences are pleased to present the first issue of 2009. In this issue the topics range from the election in the United States to a debate on if and how social sciences could profit from the theorem of self-organized criticality.
We will open the issue with Christian Martin’s Essay “Ready to lead once more – American-German relations under President Obama”. As a German political scientist living in Chicago and teaching at the Northwestern University, Christian Martin is able to give an inside view both on the German hopes towards the new administration, as well as his evaluation on how and from which point of view the new administration in the United States will respond to these expectations.
Following Christian Martin’s topical essay, André Bank in his article discusses recent contributions to Authoritarianism studies from Comparative Politics and Middle East Studies, and comes to the conclusion that Authoritarianism and with it Authoritarianism studies are on the rise again. In his literature review he evaluates the findings of previous studies on Authoritarianism and points out the limitations of these studies.
At last we include a debate between Thomas Kron and Peter Fischer. The debate has its roots in Thomas Kron’s article on the theorem of selforganized criticality in hrss’ second issue in Volume 2. A year later (Issue 2, Volume 3) his ideas where critically review by Peter Fischer in his article on historical sociology. In this issue we are pleased to print a debate that followed the publications of these two articles. The authors present their views on the questions whether or not social sciences can profit from ideas deriving from the natural science discourse and whether or not these ideas are applicable.